I don't understand — if this randomized trial shows a benefit, and this video came out over a month ago, why is it not being discussed more, or trumpeted from the rooftops?
So much is made of observational studies for other remedies, and this is a prospective randomized study. If this turns out to be an effective treatment, isn't it terrible to not be telling COVID patients to go out and get some sun (which many sick people don't do)? As the doctor mentions, the sun is free, and would likely provide a similar benefit (if not greater).
> I don't understand — if this randomized trial shows a benefit, and this video came out over a month ago, why is it not being discussed more, or trumpeted from the rooftops?
Since COVID began, there have been thousands of papers, studies, and small-scale trials that supposedly showed something positive, but the results can't be replicated in other studies or disappear when the sample size is scaled up.
In this case, the first study linked in that YouTube video description (I don't have time to watch it, sorry) is a report from n=30 patients in a Brazilian hospital in a somewhat obscure journal.
Given n=30 patients, I would have expected the data to be available or at least to see a graph of the 30 dots so we could visualize the difference. Instead, there's a note at the bottom that says they'll provide the data on request. I don't put much faith into obscure papers that won't even show their small datasets.
Maybe there's something here, maybe not, but if there was something this significant you can bet that medical device companies would be all over it. The medical industry doesn't like to leave golden opportunities on the table.
There is many more studies on infrared. On mices, on humans.
Search "medcram infrared"
I am becoming more and more disillusioned of the medical system (I have seen a bit of how it work from the inside)
Pharma make all the repeatable money
They buy their way into anything: research, institutions, government, media, doctor formation.
The best possible business for them is multiple chronical disease that need daily medication and unsurprisingly, it’s exactly what is happening to more and more people each year.
Interesting point about the data only being available on request. That doesn't seem like the authors are super proud of their work. I wonder if they, or others, are doing larger follow-up studies, which could show whether this was a fluke or a glimmer of a real mechanism.
>but if there was something this significant you can bet that medical device companies would be all over it. The medical industry doesn't like to leave golden opportunities on the table.
Totally agree, except that mere sunlight could be a decent substitute for whatever they would develop and sell. Surely some people would pay top-dollar for the FDA-approved medical devices, but if sunlight provides similar benefits, lots of people (younger, poorer) would probably just stick with that.
> Interesting point about the data only being available on request. That doesn't seem like the authors are super proud of their work.
Noting that data is available upon request isn't exactly strange
But with an n=30 study, I'd expect a simple chart with the 15 control and 15 active participants on a plot.
This would make it easy to see if one group had, for example, 1-2 outliers that skewed the average. In small scale studies like this, you could have something like 1 patient who stayed in the hospital for 60 days in one group while everyone else has a more typical ~9 day stay. That outlier would skew the results to an extreme.
That's just one example. The real question is why they didn't include the simple chart, which would have allowed for us to see at a glance whether or not they had outliers.
Yeah, I did wonder if it's just lack of a profit motive. I also wondered if scientists would be hesitant to show that "bringing light in through the skin" — which Trump was famously creamed for [1] — might actually work.
So much is made of observational studies for other remedies, and this is a prospective randomized study. If this turns out to be an effective treatment, isn't it terrible to not be telling COVID patients to go out and get some sun (which many sick people don't do)? As the doctor mentions, the sun is free, and would likely provide a similar benefit (if not greater).